The Media Mirror – Today's Russian press review

Monday's Russian newspapers write about the MAKS-2007 air show and its audience that knows surprisingly a lot about airplanes, note improvements in the life of Chechnya, and comment on Boris Beresovsky’s latest statements.

IZVESTIA confirms the fact that surprised many foreigners during the Moscow air show: the general public in Russia not only likes airplanes but also knows a lot about them. This phenomenon has no age limits.

On another page the paper has this picture of a young aerospace enthusiast. He shows a real hands-on approach in his study of the engine.

VREMYA NOVOSTEI writes that in Chechnya these days the somber figure of a man with a gun begins to look out of place. A reporter who has been in and out of Chechnya for years, shares his surprise at the pace of reconstruction. The airport and the outskirts of Grozny look new and peaceful. The city itself has changed its color from black, burned-by-war, to white.

The same paper reports on the unique court case in the city of Tver’. Half of the members of the city Duma, the City Council, have been implicated in multiple accounts of bribery. The investigation found out that beside individual bribes, the group led by the speaker himself, even managed to sell a majority vote on a construction project. The article elaborates: if convicted, members of the City Hall gang will be handed jail terms of seven to nine years.

Boris Berezovsky, writes KOMSOMOLSKAYA PRAVDA, just cannot sit still in London. Now again he is trying to attract as much attention as possible by calling for European interference in Russian affairs.

MOSKOVSKI KOMSOMOLETS says he has found a loophole in the British legal system: Berezovsky calls for war without saying it. He says he stands for non-violent methods, so he cannot be tried for extremism or war-mongering.

The cartoon in the newspaper mocks the famous photograph of Lenin carrying a log in the big clean-up of the Kremlin in 1918. Berezovsky here is hanging from one end of the log, riding the revolution towards his own goal.

KOMSOMOLSKAYA PRAVDA writes that it might be high time for Russia to implement political correctness. The paper says, in Soviet times we were alike. Now we have discovered that we are very different. We, meaning the people of Russia – multi-ethnic and multi-cultural. However, says the article, we still think that calling “The Black Square” by Malevich something like “The Colored Square” – and this already happened to black coffee in Europe – means starting a war on common sense.